Recognizing the Romantic Novel
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
The field of literature changed dramatically at the end of the eighteenth century, as under the shadow of Romanticism the novel became the most important literary genre of its day. Often neglected, the novels of the Romantic era puzzle critics yet are much more concerned with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncanny than their immediate predecessors or successors, and their authors include some of the most important novelists of British literary history—Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, James Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott among them. Featuring contributions from distinguished scholars in the field, Recognizing the Romantic Novel evaluates the vibrancy and centrality of the Romantic novel, showcasing the important new voices and directions in the field and showing it can hold its own in the canon of literary scholarship.
“These essays offer us a lens through which we may recognize the Romantic novel as it has never been recognized before.”—Times Literary Supplement
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman
1. ‘Launched Upon the Sea of Moral and Political Inquiry’: The Ethical Experiments of the Romantic Novel
Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman
2. Bad Marriages, Bad Novels: The ‘Philosophical Romance’
Laura Mandell
3. Enlightenment or Illumination: The Spectre of Conspiracy in Gothic Fictions of the 1790s
Markman Ellis
4. Burney’s Conservatism: Masculine Value and ‘the Ingenuous Cecilia’
Helen Thompson
5. ‘All Agog to Find Her Out’: Compulsory Narration in The Wanderer
Suzie Asha Park
6. A Select Collection: Barbauld, Scott, and the Rise of the (Reprinted) Novel
Michael Gamer
7. Austen, Empire and Moral Virtue
Saree Makdisi
8. Fanny Price’s British Museum: Empire, Genre, and Memory in Mansfield Park
Miranda Burgess
9. Between the Lines: Poetry, Persuasion, and the Feelings of the Past
Mary Jacobus
10. Scholarly Revivals: Gothic Fiction, Secret History, and Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Ina Ferris
11. Sympathy, Physiognomy, and Scottish Romantic Fiction
Ian Duncan
Works Cited
Index
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
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